The authors suggest that these laxer grading standards may help explain why private school students are over-represented in top medical, business and law schools and certain Ph.D. programs: Admissions officers are fooled by private school students’ especially inflated grades.

Science departments now grade, on average, 0.2 points lower than social science departments.

Relatively lower grades in the sciences discourage American students from studying such disciplines.

The authors write that this has implications for our international student body:

Partly because of our current ad hoc grading system, it is not surprising that the U.S. has to rely heavily upon foreign-born graduate students for technical fields of research and upon foreign-born employees in its technology firms.

Want more information? The authors' GradeInflation.com website has a wealth of charts and graphs for the data used in their study, as well as listings of data by school, from Harvard and Yale to Albion and Spelman.